Slackvent Days 20 - 24
Here's my post for the last 4 days of "Slackvent" (see previous posts for more context: 1, 2, 3), including my overall thoughts on the collection. Firstly, a hearty thank you again to my ink swap buddy! She did an awesome job of selecting these inks and gave me double the prescribed number. 🤩 More thoughts on that later.
Starting with day 20's ink, it's The Black Cat, from Wearingeul, an Endless Pens exclusive. It's a very deep gray-purple with dark purple-magenta shimmer. Of course, I'm already enamored because it has "cat" in the title. 😅 But the dusky dark purple also fits in quite well with my dusky ink preferences.
Papier Plume Water Gardens was a limited edition ink that debuted at the Dallas Pen Show earlier this year, a bright blue-green with bronzey/rose gold shimmer. Lovely, refreshing shade for spring or summertime.
At first when I unwrapped Wearingeul No Longer Human, I thought it would be a dark red ink, as I got it mixed up with Wearingeul's Human Issue (or Human Problem?). Oops! But No Longer Human looks kind of like a less saturated, slightly more purple version of The Black Cat without shimmer. It's nice to have a lighter version of this dusky purple base color.
I hadn't heard of the next ink, Troublemaker Kilom-Kilom, but that's because it's a new Endless Pens "Hatch" exclusive ink, in a set with a couple other dream-related inks. Kilom-kilom means evening or dusk in Cebuano, a Filipino dialect; the other two inks in the set are Dream or damgo and Nightmare or urom. It's a cool chromoshading ink that in writing is a medium gray, and has blue, pink, and purple tones. It looks similar to Sailor Manyo Hinoki, which was day 15's ink, but it appears a little less saturated. I'll have to compare them in pens.
And finally, day 24's ink is Colorverse Hwang Cho, a beautiful sage green with some light brown or yellow tones. Its ink swatch looks painterly, with some dark green (and blue?) shading in heavier ink pool areas.
Overall Thoughts
It is really hard to choose favorites in the collection. My ink swap buddy was really keyed in to my preferences, but also found inks that I probably wouldn't have picked up myself, yet am happy to have tried.
It always surprises me how there are ink colors that I thought I would pooh-pooh that end up being favorites, or at least are colors I liked more than I would've guessed. Doing something like ink swaps with pen friends is a great way to broaden one's horizons and ink collection. Being able to analyze the swatch of an ink I was surprised that I liked helped me realize that certain attributes, elements, undertones, etc. made the ink appealing to me, so I could look for other inks that might hit those same buttons.
For a serial ink-tester like me, ink samples are a blessing because I'm at least not buying bottles and bottles of ink all the time that I know I won't finish (and may regret buying in the first place!), but also a curse because I'm always buying a bunch of new samples instead of using up the ink I already have. 😝😅 With this collection of 24 inks, I'm having trouble deciding which ones to put in a pen first!
No Really, What Are Your Favorites?
Okay, if I had to choose my top 5, in no particular order, I'd choose: Anderillium Atlas Moth Brown, Sailor Manyo Hinoki, Dominant Industry Manschurian Violet, Wearingeul No Longer Human, and Colorverse Hwang Cho. I won't do the runners-up since that would be almost all of the remaining inks.
What do you all think of the inks in this set? Which ones would you get a sample or a bottle of? Do you have any ink recommendations, based on what was chosen in this set, and what my favorites ended up being? Let's chat here in the comments, or you can find me on Mastodon or Bluesky.
